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The first two pieces of work in this thesis look into the strategic decision of intergenerational educational investment and its implication to income inequality, skill distribution and income mobility. The contribution of my work is to incorporate matching frictions into the marriage market and analyze returns from strategic educational investments. The mechanism in the marriage market adopted follows the spirit of the competitive search model which interprets the ‘mismatch’ phenomenon as the result of coordination frictions in the matching process. The competitiveness and frictions in the family formation process create decreasing returns to high educational investment. The more parental households who choose high educational investment, the less is the return to high educational investment compared to the lower alternative. The fact that rich parental households suffer less from costly high educational investment puts the poor households at a disadvantage and the poor are more likely to be crowded out of the group that have incentives to choose high investment. The model predicts that given a certain parameter region, children of poor parents are more likely to become skilled if the fraction of rich parental households is not too large. In a multi-generational dynamic setting, it further implies the existence of a stationary household income distribution and income mobility rates. An increase in returns to education alone generates a larger stationary fraction of rich households and a larger upward income mobility rate. An increase in the cost of the high educational investment alone generates a smaller stationary fraction of rich households and a smaller upward income mobility rate. The third piece of work looks into the strategic interaction between passenger carriers over product quality and the location choice in a duopoly scheduled flight market. The model predicts that the two carriers prefer to be specialized in different flight quality (non-stop vs. one-stop) and adopt the same schedule when a higher quality difference makes the consumers less sensitive to the flight frequency. It contributes to literatures on the application of two-dimensional product differentiation in air-travel market analysis.

Inward investment is vital to the economic life of both the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China. By injecting capital from overseas, it generates exports, creates jobs, and brings advanced technology and new management styles. Legal regulations and government policies in this regard are always geared to reflect a balance between encouraging foreign business activities and maintaining certain degrees of control upon them. Based on expertise and experience that history shows, the United Kingdom offers an environment under which foreign investors can benefit from a rather complete legal framework. China today is also an attractive place for overseas capital, as its virtually limitless market is now becoming increasingly open to the world. This thesis is designed to examine the structure and performance of respective legal regulations concerning inward investment in the United Kingdom and China. With a view of gaining enlightenment from each other's experience, the thesis identifies and compares the following aspects which are of close relevance to inward investment issues, including basic structure of investment market, adoption of investment vehicles, roles of financial markets, real estate investment, taxation of investment behaviour, and settlement of disputes by arbitration. It is proposed that the analysis, materials and conclusions of this research may orientate foreign investors to get a deeper understanding about the UK investment market, and equally enable them to target their Chinese business in a more effective way.

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Foreign direct investment (FDI) has become the most important source of development finance. Foreign direct investment is said to be taking place when a foreign corporation buys at least a 10 percent shareholding in a domestic firm or undertakes a greenfield investment in a foreign country. Recognising that FDI can contribute to economic development, all governments want to attract it. The world market for FDI is highly competitive, and developing countries, in particular, seek such investments to accelerate their development efforts. Both developing and developed countries are competing for global FDI flows. The result is that FDI flows are concentrated in few developed countries. It becomes critical for economic development to developing countries to attract more FDI flows into their economies. FDI flows are basically the result of investment decisions taken by trans-national corporations in response to certain pull factors. Whether a TNC will undertake FDI in a foreign country or not depends on the existence of determinants that influence such a decision. The increase in global FDI flows is a result of firms decid ing to invest in foreign markets rather than to export to those markets. What makes FDI attractive is that, unlike portfolio investment, it is almost of permanent nature. FDI is also more desirable than loans and official development assistance (ODA) in that it does not create debt. For this and other reasons, countries are seeking to attract FDI flows. Various economic development theories have been advanced to explain the reasons firms undertake FDI rather than export to those foreign markets. These theories include theories that focus on internal organisation or the intending firm. These theories assume the imperfect market condition. Foreign firms will undertake FDI if they have superior oligopolistic advantages over the local firms. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) like other regions and countries is seeking to attract foreign direct investment. The present analysis of the performance of this region show that its share of global FDI flows is very small. The region is facing big challenges as a result of weaknesses in its individual member countries. South Africa is the best performing member in terms of attracting FDI flows and undertaking FDI in other regional countries. FDI inflows into the SADC region are predominantly goin g into resources. This evident when case of Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo is analysed. It can be said that the FDI inflow into the region is predominantly resourceseeking. It can, however, also be said that some FDI is driven by the market-seeking motive. This is evident in the case of FDI in the food and beverages sector. It is important that the countries in the SADC region work hard to address those determinants that are critical to attracting more FDI. It is evident that some countries can improve their international image if they can address negative factors such as conflicts, crime and government apathy to disregard of the rule of law. Policies and strategies that are aimed at improving the image of the region need to be coordinated among member countries, if the region is to increase its share of global FDI. / Prof. A.E. Loots

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

This paper uses a logistic regression model to assess the impact capital investment has on the probability of winning a game in the franchised 2018 North American League Championship Series. We have taken data from every game played across a variety of predictors to find that, though significant, capital difference provides at best an approximately 12% predictor of win probability. While other covariates tested provide statistical significance, the variability of these covariates make it hard to say with confidence what optimal in-game strategy is, beyond previously obvious notions of win condition.

This thesis is based on the analysis of all rural property sales transactions that occurred in NSW over the period 1990-2000 and is the first complete state wide analysis of a rural property market in Australia. Previous studies on rural land performance have been restricted in both limited time periods and limited location areas. The importance of rural property, as an investment asset has been recognised in the US and UK with both countries having a rural property performance index. These indices are similar in construction, quality and reliability as the commercial property, residential property and share market indices that are also available in these countries to analyse the performance of these investment assets. Until the development of the rural property capital and total return indices in this thesis, there has never been a comprehensive and complete set of rural property investment indices available to assess the risk/return performance and investment portfolio benefits of rural property in Australia. The actual construction of the indices in this thesis have been based on the current indices produced by the Property Council of Australia for office, retail, industrial and hotel property in Australia. Based on the work in this thesis, rural property investment performance can now be compared to all major investment assets available in Australia. This research will be ongoing to ensure that the performance of rural property will be available on a semi-annual basis for use by all institutions, companies and individuals with an interest in the investment potential of rural property in Australia / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)